Artifical Intelligence

The subject of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) has long provided ample scope for long and inconclusive debates. Wikipedia seems to have settled on a view, that we may take as straw-man:

Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. [Dartmouth Conference, 1956] The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds. [John Searle’s straw-man hypothesis]

Readers of my blog will realise that I agree with Searle that his hypothesis is wrong, but for different reasons. It seems to me that mainstream AI (mAI) is about being able to take instruction. This is a part of learning, but by no means all. Thus – I claim – mAI is about a sub-set of intelligence. In many organisational settings it may be that sub-set which the organisation values. It may even be that an AI that ‘thought for itself’ would be a danger. For example, in old discussions about whether or not some type of AI could ever act as a G.P. (General Practitioner – first line doctor) the underlying issue has been whether G.P.s ‘should’ think for themselves, or just apply their trained responses. My own experience is that sometimes G.P.s doubt the applicability of what they have been taught, and that sometimes this is ‘a good thing’. In effect, we sometimes want to train people, or otherwise arrange for them to react in predictable ways, as if they were machines. mAI can create better machines, and thus has many key roles to play. But between mAI and ‘superhuman intelligence’ there seems to be an important gap: the kind of intelligence that makes us human. Can machines display such intelligence? (Can people, in organisations that treat them like machines?)

One successful mainstream approach to AI is to work with probabilities, such a P(A|B) (‘the probability of A given B’), making extensive use of Bayes’ rule, and such an approach is sometimes thought to be ‘logical’, ‘mathematical, ‘statistical’ and ‘scientific’. But, mathematically, we can generalise the approach by taking account of some context, C, using Jack Good’s notation P(A|B:C) (‘the probability of A given B, in the context C’). AI that is explicitly or implicitly statistical is more successful when it operates within a definite fixed context, C, for which the appropriate probabilities are (at least approximately) well-defined and stable. For example, training within an organisation will typically seek to enable staff (or machines) to characterise their job sufficiently well for it to become routine. In practice ‘AI’-based machines often show a little intelligence beyond that described above: they will monitor the situation and ‘raise an exception’ when the situation is too far outside what it ‘expects’. But this just points to the need for a superior intelligence to resolve the situation. Here I present some thoughts.

When we state ‘P(A|B)=p’ we are often not just asserting the probability relationship: it is usually implicit that ‘B’ is the appropriate condition to consider if we are interested in ‘A’. Contemporary mAI usually takes the conditions a given, and computes ‘target’ probabilities from given probabilities. Whilst this requires a kind of intelligence, it seems to me that humans will sometimes also revise the conditions being considered, and this requires a different type of intelligence (not just the ability to apply Bayes’ rule). For example, astronomers who refine the value of relevant parameters are displaying some intelligence and are ‘doing science’, but those first in the field, who determined which parameters are relevant employed a different kind of intelligence and were doing a different kind of science. What we need, at least, is an appropriate way of interpreting and computing ‘probability’ to support this enhanced intelligence.

The notions of Whitehead, Keynes, Russell, Turing and Good seem to me a good start, albeit they need explaining better – hence this blog. Maybe an example is economics. The notion of probability routinely used would be appropriate if we were certain about some fundamental assumptions. But are we? At least we should realise that it is not logical to attempt to justify those assumptions by reasoning using concepts that implicitly rely on them.